heroku-ping: keep your heroku websites alive

Like some people, I use heroku to keep my homepage alive. Unfortunately, the heroku dynos are powered down if they don't get requests in a certain amount of time, meaning visitors to your site often experience a nasty delay.

This is a heroku application that pings a URL every 20 minutes to fix that. No more, no less.

Usage

Clone the repo, create an app.

$ git clone https://github.com/thoughtpolice/heroku-ping.git
$ cd heroku-ping
$ heroku create ping-MYAPP
Creating ping-MYAPP... done, stack is cedar
http://ping-MYAPP.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:ping-MYAPP.git
Git remote heroku added

Now add the URL of the heroku application you want to ping using the PING_URL environment variable.

See list of accepted variables below

$ heroku config:add PING_URL=http://MYAPP.herokuapp.com
Setting config vars and restarting ping-MYAPP... done, v3
PING_URL: http://MYAPP.herokuapp.com

Now push, and scale the worker to 1 instance.

$ git push heroku master
...
-----> Ruby app detected
-----> Installing dependencies using Bundler version 1.3.0.pre.5
...
-----> Discovering process types
       Procfile declares types -> worker
       Default types for Ruby  -> console, rake
-----> Compiled slug size: 688K
-----> Launching... done, v5
       http://ping-aseipp.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku
...
$ heroku ps:scale worker=1
Scaling worker processes... done, now running 1

You're done. Now your web application will be kept alive! You can make sure it's working by checking heroku logs.

Environment variables

Name	Expected value	Description	Example
PING_URL	URI (with scheme)	One or multiple URLs to ping. A , character is treated as delimeter when passing more than one value	http://www.google.com,https://github.com
PING_METHOD	HEAD (default) or GET	HTTP request method used for pinging	GET
PING_INTERVAL	Integer number (default is 1200)	Time between pings. Specified in seconds	60
PING_VERIFY_SSL	0 (default) or 1	Should we expect valid SSL certificate if URI begins with https?	1

Join in

Be sure to read the contributing guidelines. File bugs in the GitHub issue tracker.

Master git repository:

• git clone https://github.com/thoughtpolice/heroku-ping.git

There's also a BitBucket mirror:

• git clone https://bitbucket.org/thoughtpolice/heroku-ping.git

Authors

See AUTHORS.txt.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt for terms of copyright and redistribution.